TigerBeetle is a financial accounting database designed for mission critical safety and performance to power the future of financial services.

Take part in TigerBeetle's $20k consensus challenge: Viewstamped Replication Made Famous

Watch an introduction to TigerBeetle on Zig SHOWTIME for our design decisions regarding performance, safety, and financial accounting primitives:

Read more about the history of TigerBeetle, the problem of balance tracking at scale, and the solution of a purpose-built financial accounting database.

TigerBeetle is not yet production-ready. The production version of TigerBeetle is now under active development. Our DESIGN doc provides an overview of TigerBeetle's data structures.

Check out our roadmap below for where we're heading! And join one of our communities to stay in the loop about fixes and features!

Check out docs.tigerbeetle.com. Here are a few key pages you might be interested in:

• Deployment
  • Hardware
• Usage
  • Integration
• Reference
  • Accounts
  • Transfers
  • Operations

TigerBeetle is easy to run with or without Docker, depending on your preference. First, we'll cover running the Single Binary. And below that is how to run with Docker.

Install TigerBeetle by grabbing the latest release from GitHub.

x86_64 and aarch64 builds are available for macOS and Linux. Only x86_64 builds are available for Windows.

For example:

$ curl -LO https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle/releases/download/2023-03-27-weekly/tigerbeetle-x86_64-linux-2023-03-27-weekly.zip
$ unzip tigerbeetle-x86_64-linux-2023-03-27-weekly.zip
$ sudo cp tigerbeetle /usr/local/bin/tigerbeetle # On Windows, add $(pwd) to $env:PATH instead.
$ tigerbeetle version --verbose | head -n6
TigerBeetle version experimental

git_commit="55c8fdf1f52c7a174d1bc9d9785cf4e327cae182"

build.mode=Mode.ReleaseSafe
build.zig_version=0.9.1

NOTE: This example version is not kept up-to-date. So always check the releases page for the latest version. You can also find debug builds for each arch/OS combo on the release page as well.

Or to build from source, clone the repo, checkout a release, and run the install script.

You will need POSIX userland, curl or wget, tar, and xz.

$ git clone https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle.git
$ cd tigerbeetle
$ git checkout 2022-11-16-weekly # Or latest tag
$ scripts/install.sh

Don't worry, this will only make changes within the tigerbeetle directory. No global changes. The result will place the compiled tigerbeetle binary into the current directory.

Then create the TigerBeetle data file.

$ ./tigerbeetle format --cluster=0 --replica=0 --replica-count=1 0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): creating "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(io): allocating 660.140625MiB...

And start the server.

$ ./tigerbeetle start --addresses=3000 0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): opening "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(main): 0: cluster=0: listening on 127.0.0.1:3000

Now skip ahead to Use Node as a CLI.

First provision TigerBeetle's data directory.

$ docker run -v $(pwd)/data:/data ghcr.io/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle \
    format --cluster=0 --replica=0 --replica-count=1 /data/0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): creating "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(io): allocating 660.140625MiB...

Then run the server.

$ docker run -p 3000:3000 -v $(pwd)/data:/data ghcr.io/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle \
    start --addresses=0.0.0.0:3000 /data/0_0.tigerbeetle
info(io): opening "0_0.tigerbeetle"...
info(main): 0: cluster=0: listening on 0.0.0.0:3000

Note: if you are on macOS, you will need to call the Docker run command with --cap-add IPC_LOCK or --ulimit memlock=-1:-1. See here for more information.

Now that you've got the server running with or without Docker, let's connect to the running server and do some accounting!

First install the Node client.

$ npm install tigerbeetle-node

Then create a client connection.

$ node
Welcome to Node.js v16.14.0.
Type ".help" for more information.
> let { createClient } = require('tigerbeetle-node');
> let client = createClient({ cluster_id: 0, replica_addresses: ['3000'] });
info(message_bus): connected to replica 0

Now create two accounts. (Don't worry about the details, you can read about them later.)

> let errors = await client.createAccounts([
  {
    id: 1n,
    ledger: 1,
    code: 718,
    user_data: 0n,
    reserved: Buffer.alloc(48, 0),
    flags: 0,
    debits_pending: 0n,
    debits_posted: 0n,
    credits_pending: 0n,
    credits_posted: 0n,
    timestamp: 0n,
  },
  {
    id: 2n,
    ledger: 1,
    code: 718,
    user_data: 0n,
    reserved: Buffer.alloc(48, 0),
    flags: 0,
    debits_pending: 0n,
    debits_posted: 0n,
    credits_pending: 0n,
    credits_posted: 0n,
    timestamp: 0n,
  },
]);
> errors
[]

Now create a transfer of 10 (of some amount/currency) between the two accounts.

> errors = await client.createTransfers([
  {
    id: 1n,
    debit_account_id: 1n,
    credit_account_id: 2n,
    pending_id: 0n,
    user_data: 0n,
    reserved: 0n,
    timeout: 0n,
    ledger: 1,
    code: 718,
    flags: 0,
    amount: 10n,
    timestamp: 0n,
  }
]);

Now, the amount of 10 has been credited to account 2 and debited from account 1. Let's query TigerBeetle for these two accounts to verify!

> let accounts = await client.lookupAccounts([1n, 2n]);
> console.log(accounts.map(a => ({
    id: a.id,
	debits_posted: a.debits_posted,
	credits_posted: a.credits_posted,
	timestamp: a.timestamp,
  })));
[
  {
    id: 1n,
    debits_posted: 10n,
    credits_posted: 0n,
    timestamp: 1662489240014463675n
  },
  {
    id: 2n,
    debits_posted: 0n,
    credits_posted: 10n,
    timestamp: 1662489240014463676n
  }
]

And indeed you can see that account 1 has debits_posted as 10 and account 2 has credits_posted as 10. The 10 amount is fully accounted for!

For further reading:

• Running a 3-node cluster locally with docker-compose
• Run a single-node cluster with Docker
• Run a single-node cluster

• For Node.js: tigerbeetle-node
• For Golang: tigerbeetle-go
• For Java: tigerbeetle-java
• For C# and Dotnet: tigerbeetle-dotnet

• Projects using TigerBeetle developed by community members.
• Join the TigerBeetle chat on Slack.
• Follow us on Twitter, YouTube, and Twitch.
• Subscribe to our monthly newsletter for the backstory on recent database changes.
• Check out past and upcoming talks.

First grab the sources and run the setup script:

$ git clone https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle.git
$ cd tigerbeetle
$ scripts/install.sh

With TigerBeetle installed, you are ready to benchmark!

$ scripts/benchmark.sh

If you encounter any benchmark errors, please send us the resulting benchmark.log.

Read docs/HACKING.md.

Along the way, we also put together a series of performance demos and sketches to get you comfortable building TigerBeetle, show how low-level code can sometimes be easier than high-level code, help you understand some of the key components within TigerBeetle, and enable back-of-the-envelope calculations to motivate design decisions.

You may be interested in:

• demos/protobeetle, how batching changes everything.
• demos/bitcast, how Zig makes zero-overhead network deserialization easy, fast and safe.
• demos/io_uring, how ring buffers can eliminate kernel syscalls, reduce server hardware requirements by a factor of two, and change the way we think about event loops.
• demos/hash_table, how linear probing compares with cuckoo probing, and what we look for in a hash table that needs to scale to millions (and billions) of account transfers.

See tigerbeetle#259.

Copyright 2023 TigerBeetle, Inc

Copyright 2020-2022 Coil Technologies, Inc

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use these files except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.